Let’s say we find a portal to an alternate dimension which is exactly like ours and the US military of that dimension invades the US so that they are on about equal footing with the US military of this dimension, including manufacturing facilities, agencies, satellites etc. No nukes as that would make it too quick. Presume a competent commander-in-chief on both sides. What would that look like?
Weird is what it would look like. Half of each military would be set for a Fulda Gap style clash of armored divisions and lethal AA capabilities. The other half would be set for asymmetrical warfare against a lesser opponent, and would require time to adapt.
The portal would serve as a choke point, so the advantage goes to the defender.
It would be quick. Modern weapons systems are very lethal but few in number because they’re expensive.
The entire U.S. military has about 4500 combat planes, to use that example, and that’s assuming they’re all battle ready at once, which isn’t the case. 4500 sounds like a lot and it is by modern standards - it’s the most anyone has - but in a war they would all be swiftly blown to bits. IF one side got an early edge it might quickly overwhelm the other.
The expensive and shiny stuff wouldn’t last long, leaving behind just soldiers and rifles and basic stuff, and it takes so long to build the expensive stuff that it might never factor in much again.
What would be the main targets early on? What would each side try to do?
Read “1984”. Both sides would prolong the stalemate as long as possible while squandering resources and harvesting patriotism.
There isn’t one thing, exactly, but US doctrine calls for the establishment of air and naval supremacy. What you would see happen first would be an air and naval battle of unprecedented rapidity and ferocity. Most of both sides’ assets would be swiftly blown to bits. It’s likely by random chance one side would end up with something left, though, which could be used to establish air supremacy over land operations. Or try, at least. If there isn’t a lot left much of that remaining force might not survive land based air defense. Of course I don’t know exactly where USA 2.0 is based; is there a new USA plopped in the middle of the Pacific? If so, both sides might hold back something to defend their mainland.
It wouldn’t be possible for either side to replace these losses very quickly. The USA today isn’t prepared for rebuilding its armed forces rapidly. This isn’t like WWII where belligerent nations did little else; during the Battle of Britain, the United Kingdom was literally building fighter planes faster than the Germans could shoot them down. American output was the stuff of legend. Today stuff is just harder to build and no one is planning to pump them out very fast.
The other problem you have is ordnance. Bullets and bombs are one thing, but modern weapons platforms require guided weapons of extraordinary complexity and cost, and even the USA does not stock a limitless supply. Both sides would find themselves quickly starved for the weapons that serve as the USA’s backbone. Harpoon anti ship weapons, SM-2 anti air missiles… laser guided bombs, AMRAAM air to air missiles, this stuff is expensive and it doesn’t roll off the assembly line easily. Raytheon isn’t sitting on a huge stock. Wars can be decided by a lack of such things; Argentina would probably have won the Falkland Islands War had they ever received a full shipment of Exocet anti-ship missiles. With just six missiles - total, that is all they had - they sank two ships and knocked a third out for the remainder of the war. What would have happened if they’d had 36 missiles?
Yeah, this would devolve either into a grinding land war or, if the two sides are separated by sea, just blowing up most of their navies and air forces and then glaring at each other from across the ocean.
Well, you’re fighting the OP’s hypthetical.
George Orwell famously called the book 1984 just because he wrote it in 1948. His vision of war sounds like World War II, understandably, as that’s the kind of war he was familiar with, but with the new tech typical of the very end of the war - rocket attacks similar to V1s, and he mentions helicopters, and “Floating Fortresses.” Orwell’s endless war is like World War II in that is grinds, year after year, fronts of mighty armies constantly pushing and pulling.
It’s dubious modern war would be like that. Both sides would swiftly lose their advances systems. Neither side has huge armies the way they did in Orwell’s day.
C3: command/control/communication. Knock those out and the opposing military may still exist but it doesn’t do anything.
The United States is not Oceania. Americans don’t like prolonged wars. We want quick decisive wars. The longer the war goes on, the less popular it becomes - and the less popular the politicians in charge become.
I assumed the question would be a lot different and possibly more interesting, could the entire US military of 1945 defeat the US military of today? Just putting total military force of 1945 against total available military force of 2019 (just before the coronavirus shifted priorities)
I think the opposite is true and Orwell foresaw the shift. WW2, both sides threw all they had at each other’ Since then, the US just milked it for corporate profit. We beat Germany and Japan in 5 years, but failed to beat Vietnam in ten or Iraq in 20.
1984 clearly states there was no “human” war with casualties going, it was just posturung at frontiers, intended to waste wealth to keep a middle class from arising to threaten a hierarchy.
If both sides went all-out, it wouldn’t be long before the only weapons left are sticks and stones.
I’ve actually wondered about the materiel question as well. It’s much more complicated to build an F-35, with a vastly more complex supply chain (compared to WWII kit).
Would we see a devolution of weapons systems? That is, as they were consumed, would there be a thinking that, well, we can get another 20 planes out if we leave out that special stealth component, or the third layer of redundancy on some system?
I believe that a lot of the US militaries aircraft after “retirement” are placed in the desert precisely so in case of emergency we could reactive them. So in case of a “long” war we’d see older model F-16’s and F-15’s being used instead of building new aircraft.
It has nothing to do with economics or politics. The difference is nuclear weapons. Countries can no longer go “all in” on a war if a nuclear power is involved on the other side. We couldn’t fight a total war against North Korea or North Vietnam because that would have meant fighting a war against China and the Soviet Union.
And we beat Iraq in less than a month. We won the war quickly and decisively. It was the post-war occupation we screwed up.
Quick and violent as fuck, with REALLY heavy losses.
I mean, we’d have two high operational tempo forces fighting each other with some of the most advanced weaponry and support in the world.
But… it would peter out equally fast as the reserves of ammunition and equipment were consumed. Assuming neither side had some sort of difference in generalship due to random choice, we’d see a sort of lull period, where it would primarily be infantry combat, with the remaining aircraft and tanks being carefully husbanded for larger scale attacks and/or as a sort of mobile reserve. Back home, you’d see frantic efforts to build more tanks and aircraft, as well as to spin up older aircraft and tanks from storage, as well as to make more bullets, artillery shells, etc…
Probably the most glaring difference is that after the initial really intense burst of combat, a lot of the precision-guided weapons would be in much shorter supply, so we’d see more of a Vietnam-era or even earlier level of actual terminal weaponry. In other words, your F-35s would be dropping a lot of dumb bombs, and your artillery pieces would be firing regular HE shells.
Both governments would try to trade with the other nations of Earth. Someone would piss the other one off by trading with the wrong country, or in the wrong way, or both. Sanctions and stern speeches would start flying left and right, and if things didn’t cool off after that, we’d most likely get bogged down in another third world proxy war with some other country’s kids doing most of the fighting and dying and the two US governments orchestrating it but pretending they’re not really behind it. Anything to keep from making real sacrifices or using nukes. Oh, and all the defense contractors and their friends in Washington would need to build a second Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool on their palatial estates to hold all their ill gotten gold.
Well they would be precisely evenly matched, so suddenly allies would become important to both. Especially ones with force projection ability such as the UK. But if it goes like people here are predicting and a fast violent clash results in most of the shiny stuff being broken, then getting more shiny stuff from allies when the opposition does not have shinies can be quite an advantage. Like borrowing 50 F-35s from Norway. (If this is after they are complete mind)
Also, the US population might have to deal with bombing raids. This has not been something the US has had to deal with in any of its wars previously.
Would there be a tipping-point effect here? Once one side started to acquire an advantage, it would only increase, until that side won everything, big time? Or would there be some kind of negative feedback, benefiting whoever was the underdog at any given moment?
Honestly, I’m still wondering why this isn’t the correct answer.
You haven’t set out what the boundaries are between the two US’s. We don’t know what the political situation is. Or if one US can draw on its allies.
Or is this some situation where two nations are transported to some sort of battleworld? Even then, what’s the boundary? Is there possibility for manufacture and re-supply?
As written the OP is impossible to answer.